Death of a Huntsman by H.E. Bates Page B

the dancing, and even the dress, with the same unmitigated calm. When he danced with her, as he did several times, she talked with a kind of repressed propriety, saying such things as:
    â€˜It’s a most pleasant evening, Henry. And not noisy. Not a brawl. Not half as crowded as I thought it would be.’
    â€˜The Hunt’s going through a difficult patch,’ he said. ‘Rather going down, I’m afraid. There isn’t the interest. There aren’t the chaps.’
    â€˜You seem to know a lot of people, even so.’
    The more polite and calm she grew the more unreal, he thought, the night became. Alternately he danced with herself and the girl. Friendly and bantering from across the floor came exchanges of manly pleasantry with friends like Punch Warburton, Freddie Jekyll and George Reed Thompson, the city gentlemen, from odd acquaintances like Dr Frobisher, Justice Smythe and Colonel Charnly-Rose: stalwart chaps, the solid backbone of the Hunt.
    Away somewhere in the distance lay the even greater unreality of Katey: Katey drowned throughout the years of his marriage in mists of gin, Katey the tawdry lioness, Katey with her garlic-raw, smoke-stained fingers, calling him a squeak-mouse.
    He felt himself left, over and over again, with the one reality of his life that had ever meant anything. All the rest had shrivelled behind him like black burnt paper. Nothing made any sense in any sort of way any more, except the voice of the girl imploring him with the tenderest, most luminous happiness:
    â€˜Oh! Don’t wake me, will you? Please don’t wake me.’
    It would be the best possible thing now, he thought, to get it over quickly: to go straight to Katey, in the morning, and tell her what had happened and how, because of it, he could not go on with the old, damnable dreary business any longer.
    He had arrived at this, the simplest of decisions, by midnight, when Edna Whittington, the girl and himself sat down to supper. To his relief and surprise it was a remarkably pleasant supper. He poured champagne and the girl, unreproached, was allowed to drink it. He fetched, with his own hands, as she and her mother expressed their fancy, plates of cold chicken or salmon, frozen strawberries and ice-cream,
mousse
and mayonnaise.
    â€˜Did I see someone with pineapple gateau, Henry?’ Edna Whittington said and he went dutifully to search for it, pursued by a voice of unbelievably husky-sweet encouragement: ‘And be a lamb and find cream, Henry, if you can. Dancing makes me hungry.’
    In the next hour the wine, the food and the utter absence of malignity in all that Edna Whittington said or did had lured him into a state where he was no longer apprehensive or uncertain or even ready to go into brave and antagonistic battle against her.
    In consequence he was as unprepared as a rabbit sitting before a stoat when, at one o’clock, Edna Whittington looked at her watch, then at the girl, then at himself and said:
    â€˜Child, it’s time for you to go home. Henry, are you ready to take her?’
Chapter 10
    The girl did not move. He felt the ease of the evening shatter with an ugly crack. His nerves upheld his skin with minute pin-pricks of actual pain.
    â€˜I said it was time to go home, child. Get your things. Put your coat on. Mr Barnfield will take you.’
    The girl still did not move or speak. Looking at her, he was reminded of the first morning he had ever met her. The innocent insolence had come back to her face again and he understood it now.
    â€˜Valerie.’
    Edna Whittington waited. He lifted his glass, drank some champagne and waited too. The girl still did not move. She sat with black gloves composed and crossed on the table in front of her. Her eyes, not so wide and circular as they often were, looked half down at her hands, half at the dance floor. Just above the cut of theyellow dress her breasts started to rise and fall rather quickly but otherwise she did not